Methods for efficiently authenticating multiple objects based on access patterns

ABSTRACT

Techniques for efficiently authenticating multiple objects and clustering objects based on access patterns are provided. For example, in an illustrative aspect of the invention, a technique for generating and/or reading authentication information, wherein the authentication information provides evidence that a plurality of objects were one of generated and sent by an entity, comprises using one or more object access patterns indicative of whether at least two of the plurality of objects are accessed within a similar time period to group objects together to reduce an overhead for at least one of generating and reading the authentication information.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This application is related to the concurrently filed U.S. patentapplication Ser No. 10/977,206 and entitled “Systems and Methods forEfficiently Clustering Objects Based on Access Patterns,” the disclosureof which is incorporated by reference herein.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention generally relates to content distributiontechniques and, more particularly, to techniques for efficientlyauthenticating multiple objects based on access patterns.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Content distribution systems include content consumers that consume dataand content publishers that publish data to content consumers. In anenvironment such as the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW or the “web”),content publishers are typically web servers. Content consumers are webclients which access the content of the web server.

Three characteristics of a content distribution system are worth noting.

First, there are usually a large number of content consumerscorresponding to one content provider. Moreover, many content consumershave limited computation power. For example, a web client can be ahand-held device. Thus, it is desirable to reduce the overheadassociated with retrieving the content provided by content providers.

Second, a content consumer usually selectively retrieves the objectsprovided by content providers instead of retrieving all of the objects.

Third, content consumers often retrieve content through a third party.The third party should have the capacity to serve a large number ofcontent consumers. After receiving the content from the contentprovider, the third party can service the requests of content consumersthrough its cache and thus offload load from the content providers. Forexample, a consumer can retrieve the content of a web server through aweb cache. This scenario is especially common in peer-to-peer and gridcomputing environments. Thus, the third party needs to have somecapacity to convince the content consumer that the content fetched isindeed produced by the content provider.

Content distribution systems may employ the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)protocol. SSL is a secure web-based transport protocol that allowscommunication between two parties to be authenticated. By way ofexample, the SSL protocol is described in detail in A. Freier et al.,“The SSL Protocol Version 3.0.” Each of the two parties has a publickey. In the beginning of the communication, two parties generate ashared key with their public key. The subsequent communication is thenencrypted symmetrically with the shared key to reduce overhead ofauthentication. Authentication with SSL requires both ends of thecommunication to be trusted and secure. Thus, SSL can not allowauthentication to go through an un-trusted or non-secure infrastructureor intermediate layer.

Content distribution systems may also employ techniques forauthenticating a stream of packages such as, for example, thosedisclosed in C. K. Wong et al., “Digital Signatures for Flows andMulticasts,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, pp. 502-513, August1999. By linking later packets to earlier packets, the overhead ofpublic key signatures of initial packets are amortized over manysubsequent packets. Various link structures are proposed to allow thelater packets to be reachable through links even when there are packetlosses. In a packet stream, packets are produced and consumed in a fixedorder, and each packet can not be modified. Whereas in contentdistribution, objects can be accessed in any order, and objects can bemodified in any order.

Accordingly, a need exists for techniques which overcome theabove-mentioned and other limitations associated with existing contentdistribution systems.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention provides techniques for efficiently authenticatingmultiple objects and clustering objects based on access patterns.

For example, in a first illustrative aspect of the invention, atechnique for generating and/or reading authentication information,wherein the authentication information provides evidence that aplurality of objects were one of generated and sent by an entity,comprises using one or more object access patterns indicative of whetherat least two of the plurality of objects are accessed within a similartime period to group objects together to reduce an overhead for at leastone of generating and reading the authentication information.

In a second illustrative aspect of the invention, a technique forclustering a plurality of objects based on access patterns comprises thefollowing steps/operations. A first group of sets is created in which atleast one set includes a plurality of objects read in close temporalproximity to each other. A second group of sets is created in which atleast one set contains a plurality of objects written in close temporallocality to each other. A third group of sets is created in which atleast one set s1 is constructed by identifying at least two objects o1and o2 in a same set of the first group. At least one object is added toset s1 which is included in a set including object o1 of the secondgroup. At least one object is added to set s1 which is included in a setincluding object o2 of said second group.

Advantageously, the invention provides techniques that use object accesspatterns that can be used to reduce the cost of the authentication of aplurality of objects. Object access patterns may include write patternsand read patterns. Write patterns may describe which sets of objects areoften written together. Read patterns may describe which sets of objectsare often read by similar clients and may include the order of thesereads. Write patterns may be tracked by write sets and read patterns maybe tracked by read sets and/or read order graphs. The inventivetechniques can use object access patterns captured in these datastructures to reduce the cost of generating signatures for a pluralityof objects.

Furthermore, in one embodiment, objects that are often read and writtenmay be grouped into one authentication tree to reduce the size ofsignatures without increasing processing overhead. Moreover, the objectsmay be placed into the authentication tree based on an access order ofthese objects to reduce the size of signatures further. Thisauthentication method is especially valuable in an environment where thepublisher distributes its content through intermediate layers that maynot be trusted or are not secure enough. Examples are web portals,caches, peer-to-peer system, and grid-based systems.

The inventive mechanisms for clustering objects can be used for otherpurposes in addition to authentication. For example, they can be usedfor reducing the overhead of storing objects on disk.

These and other objects, features and advantages of the presentinvention will become apparent from the following detailed descriptionof illustrative embodiments thereof, which is to be read in connectionwith the accompanying drawings.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating an example of a content distributionsystem architecture within which techniques of the present invention maybe employed;

FIG. 2 is a diagram illustrating an object access pattern, according toan embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 3 is a diagram illustrating a methodology for generatingauthentication trees, according to an embodiment of the presentinvention;

FIG. 4 is a diagram illustrating various illustrative mechanisms toextract object access patterns, according to embodiments of the presentinvention;

FIG. 5 is a diagram illustrating write sets, according to an embodimentof the present invention;

FIG. 6 is a diagram illustrating a methodology for generating writesets, according to an embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 7 is a diagram illustrating a process of partitioning objects intoauthentication groups, according to an embodiment of the presentinvention;

FIG. 8 is a diagram illustrating an example of a process of partitioningobjects into authentication groups, according to an embodiment of thepresent invention;

FIG. 9 is a diagram illustrating a read order graph, according to anembodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 10 is a diagram illustrating an authentication tree, according toan embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 11 is a diagram illustrating placement of objects in anauthentication tree according to access order, according to anembodiment of the present invention; and

FIG. 12 is a diagram illustrating an illustrative hardwareimplementation of a computing system in accordance with which one ormore components/steps of a content distribution system may beimplemented, according to an embodiment of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

The present invention will be explained below in the context of anillustrative Internet or web implementation with respect to contentauthentication in a content distribution system. However, it is to beunderstood that the present invention is not limited to authenticationin a content distribution system. Rather, the invention is moregenerally applicable to any environment in which it would be desirableto cluster data to improve system performance. By way of one exampleonly, techniques of the invention may also be used in a disk storagesystem to cluster data by access locality.

Furthermore, content that is to be distributed is referred to generallyherein as an “object.” An “object” may take on many forms and it is tobe understood that the invention is not limited to any particular form.For example, an object may be an electronic document such as one or moreweb pages. One skilled in the art could use the invention in a varietyof different electronic document formats including, but not limited to,HTML (HyperText Markup Language) documents, XML (eXtensible MarkupLanguage) documents, text documents in other formats, and binarydocuments. Also, the phrase “electronic document” may also be understoodto comprise one or more of text data, binary data, one or more bytestreams, etc. Thus, the invention is not limited to any particular typeof data object. Furthermore, it is to be understood that the phrase “anaccess” may include either a read or an update operation. Still further,it is to be understood that the term “overhead” may include, but is notlimited to, computer CPU (central processing unit) cycles, networkbandwidth consumption, disk, I/O (input/output), etc.

In accordance with existing web-based techniques, a content publishercan publish content through an un-trusted or non-secure intermediatelayer. To prove the authenticity of the content, a content provider canprovide the intermediate layer with a signature that authenticates thecontent, as well as the content. A client can retrieve the content,along with the signature, and use the signature to check whether thecontent is generated by the content publisher. A content publisherusually publishes many objects. Clients typically read a subset of thoseobjects.

Thus, more specifically, a content provider C may have a public key Pkassociated with it. The content provider authenticates the contentthrough this key and passes both the content and the signature to athird party. The third party is only responsible for distributing thecontent along with the related signature to content consumers. Once acontent consumer retrieves the content and the signature from the thirdparty, the customer can verify whether the signature is indeed generatedby the content publisher for the content.

A technique for authenticating multiple objects is to use authenticationtrees. With an authentication tree, a group of objects can beauthenticated with only one public key signature and hashing. Computinghashes is usually much cheaper than computing public key signatures. Asa result, the cost of one public key signature is amortized over all theobjects in the authentication. An authentication tree is usually abinary tree. The leaves are the hashes of the individual objects to beauthenticated. An intermediate node is the hash of its two children. Thesize of the signature is determined by the number of objects in theauthentication tree.

As will be explained in illustrative detail herein, two main aspects ofthe invention are: using object access patterns to divide the objectsinto authentication groups, and using likely object access orders toplace objects in authentication groups.

The first aspect is to divide the objects into groups according toobject access patterns. According to the present invention, the objectsthat are often updated and read together may be grouped together. Agroup may be authenticated with some group authentication technique suchas authentication trees. Reducing the authentication group size canreduce the size of the signature for each object, which in turn reducesthe network bandwidth, storage, and processing overhead. Grouping theobjects that are often updated together reduces the number of public keysignatures that are required to be generated by the content publisherand to be verified by clients.

We call a group of objects that are updated together a “write set.” Whenthe objects in a write set are updated, the authentication group isre-authenticated once instead of as many times as the number of objectsin the write set. Grouping the objects that are often read together canreduce the size of authentication groups and thus the size of signatureswhile preserving the public key operation reduction benefit offered bylarge trees. A goal of this approach is to place objects that are likelyto be read by the same clients into one or a small number ofauthentication trees. If there are no updates, a client only needs toverify one or a small number of public key signatures to verify all theobjects.

Benefits are even greater when we consider updates. When an object isupdated in an authentication tree, the root of the tree is generallyrequired to be re-authenticated with an expensive public-key signature.Reducing the size of the authentication tree accessed by a clientreduces the chances that the client is forced to re-authenticate theroot of the tree.

A second aspect of the invention is to use the likely read order of theobjects to determine object placement in a group authenticationtechnique such as authentication trees. A goal is to place the objectsof an authentication tree in such a way that the objects in adjacentreads share as much of a signature as possible. A signature of an objectincludes the hashes of the sibling nodes of the nodes along the pathfrom the object to the root of the tree. Thus, maximizing the commonproportion of the path from the objects to the root maximizes theproportion of the signature shared by two objects. A client can cacheand reuse the shared proportion of the signatures for subsequent readsto reduce network bandwidth consumption for transferring signatures.

It is to be appreciated that the grouping or clustering methodologies ofthe invention are applicable to other areas besides authentication. Forexample, they can be used to cluster objects on disk to improveperformance.

FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating an example of a content distributionsystem architecture within which techniques of the present invention maybe employed. As shown, content distribution system 100 includes contentpublisher 102 and several content consumers 104. Content consumers maybe referred to herein as clients. The responsibility of a contentpublisher is to generate content. An intermediate layer 106 distributesthe content directly to clients. An intermediate layer can be, by way ofexample, a portal, a cache, a peer-to-peer system, a grid system, etc.An intermediate layer is usually introduced to improve performance,increase scalability, and/or add functionalities.

Publisher 102 and intermediate layer 106 can be located in differentsoftware modules on the same physical machine or can be located ondifferent machines. Hardware and software protections may be provided toensure that compromised intermediate layers can not automaticallycompromise the publisher.

The inventive techniques can allow a trusted publisher 102 to publishcontent over an un-trusted or non-secure intermediate layer. There are anumber of reasons why an intermediate layer can be less trusted orsecure than the publisher. First, intermediate layer 106 can beresponsible for delivering the content to a large number of clients andthus must be designed for high performance and scalability, which canmake this layer quite complex and be prone to security vulnerabilities.Furthermore, performance requirements often compel the use of the latesttechnology in this layer, which could make this layer less stable.Second, an intermediate layer may not be in the same administrationdomain as the publisher and thus may not have the same security standardas the publisher. Examples include web caches and proxies in apeer-to-peer or grid environment which may not be securely administratedand may be given security patches or a web portal that redistributes thecontent.

According to the present invention, a publisher authenticates itscontent by attaching signatures to its contents and sends them to theintermediate layer. This is illustrated as 108 in FIG. 1, wherein O_(n)(n=1, 2, 3, . . . ) refers to the object and Sig(O_(n)) refers to theattached signature. When a client retrieves an object from theintermediate layer, it also retrieves the signature and can verify theauthenticity of the object.

A publisher has a public key and private key pair. The public key isalso known to clients and clients use the public key to check theauthenticity of the content. A naïve method is for the publisher to signevery object using its private key and for clients to check theauthenticity using the public key. But public key operations can beprohibitively expensive for both publishers and clients. In accordancewith the present invention, methodologies are provided to exploit objectaccess patterns 110 to reduce the cost of authenticating multipleobjects.

According to the present invention, the cost of authentication ofmultiple objects can be reduced with two techniques: using object accesspatterns to divide the objects into authentication groups, and usinglikely object access order to place objects in each authenticationgroup.

The first technique is to divide objects into authentication groups. Theobjects that are often accessed together are grouped together. A groupof objects that are updated together is called a write set. In thepresent invention, the objects in a write set may be in anauthentication group. When a write set is updated, the authenticationgroup is re-authenticated once instead of as many times as the number ofthe objects in the write set. In some examples, each write set is anauthentication group. In other examples, the write sets are furthergrouped into authentication groups. The write sets whose objects areoften read together are grouped into an authentication group. A goal isto reduce the expected number of authentication groups that are neededto contain objects accessed by one client.

The second technique is to use the likely order of object accesses toplace objects in an authentication group. One example of the groupsignature technique is authentication trees. Consider an example inwhich an object B is likely to be accessed immediately after the objectA. Let P1 be the path from A to the root and P2 the path from B to theroot. Let P3 be the part of the paths that are shared by P1 and P2. Thesignature of A includes the siblings of P1 and the signature of Bincludes the siblings of P2. Both the signatures share the sibling ofP3. A client can cache and reuse the sibling of P3 and only the partsthat are not in P3 need to be retransmitted for authenticating B.Maximizing the shared path between two objects that are likely to beaccessed in a short time interval reduces the network traffic.

Furthermore, the invention provides a method that exploits object accesspatterns to reduce both the number of public key operations and the sizeof signatures. The aspects of object access patterns that are consideredinclude read clusterness, write clusterness, and read order. Based onread clusterness and write clusterness, objects are partitioned intodifferent authentication trees as follows: I) the objects that arelikely to be written together are grouped into the same authenticationtree; II) the objects that are likely to be read together are alsogrouped into the same authentication tree.

Placing objects that tend to be written together reduces the number ofpublic key infrastructure (PKI) operations by publishers and clientsduring writes. A publisher only needs to authenticate the root of theauthentication tree once for a set of writes. A client also only needsto check one new version of the signature of the root. The inventionalso reduces signature size by exploiting the order that those objectsare read. The basic idea is to cache and reuse the part of signatures ofpreviously read objects.

FIG. 2 is a diagram illustrating an object access pattern, according toan embodiment of the present invention. More particularly, while FIG. 2shows many aspects of an object access pattern 200 that are provided forefficient authentications, other aspects that are not expressly shownmay be provided. Some of these aspects can include object readclusterness (202), object write clusterness (204), object read order(206), read frequency, write frequency, and read frequency related writefrequency (208), the number of clients in the system, the number ofobjects in the system (210), the number of clients that read eachobject, the object popularity related to read and write frequency,consistency requirements of the system, whether the system is dealingwith a read operation versus a write operation (212), and so on.

FIG. 3 is a diagram illustrating a methodology for generatingauthentication trees, according to an embodiment of the presentinvention. More particularly, FIG. 3 shows possible steps to be taken bya web server (part of the context distribution system) to generateauthentication trees. The server first captures an object access pattern(step 302). This information will guide steps 304 and 306. Someillustrative mechanisms for capturing such patterns are described belowin the context of FIG. 4. After capturing the object access pattern, theserver uses the object access pattern(s) to divide objects into multipleauthentication groups (step 304). Each group may be authenticated withan authentication tree, although other authentication methods thatexploit object access clusterness can also be used. Another aspect ofobject access pattern, i.e., the access order, is also fed into thesystem to guide the placement of the objects in an authentication tree(step 306). Good placement allows a maximum amount of signatures ofprevious objects to be reused for the authentication of currently readobjects. Thus, the one or more authentication trees are generated (step308).

FIG. 4 illustrates various illustrative mechanisms to extract objectaccess patterns, according to embodiments of the present invention.These mechanisms can be classified into two categories: using systeminternal mechanisms (internals) 402 and using online analysis 404. Thesystem internals 402 include dependency tracking mechanisms 406 such asobject dependency graph 408, static analysis of the code 410 of theapplication, and so on. In online analysis 404, the system analyzeswhich objects are written and read by what clients and when these readsand writes happen.

One example to capture write clusterness is to use write sets. FIG. 5illustrates examples of write sets W1, W2, W3, W4, W5 and W6. A writeset can have two components: its elements and its weight. The members ofa write set are the objects contained in the write set, i.e., the set ofobjects that are often written together. The weight of a write set is anumber indicating how likely it is that the objects are writtentogether. The weight can be normalized by scaling all the weightsproportionally.

For example, the elements of W1 are A,C and its weight is 3, whichindicates A and C are often written together but less frequently than awrite set with a higher weight such as W2.

One way to generate write sets is by inferring them from an objectdependency graph or ODG (408 of FIG. 4). One method is to place objectswithin one connected component of an ODG into a write set. Anothermethod is to place leaf objects reachable from a maximal node into awrite set.

Another way to generate write sets is to analyze object read and/orwrite patterns online (404 of FIG. 4). One method is to group writeswhich occur within T units of time together. Such a process 600 isillustrated in FIG. 6. Initially, a write set begins with the firstobject that is updated (step 602). When the second object O is updated,the process determines if the update of O is within T units of time ofthe first write (step 604). If this is true, O is added into the writeset (step 606) and the process continues. Otherwise, the process endswith the write set W (step 608). Then, the process determines if thewrite set W exists previously (step 610). If so, the weight of W isincremented by one (step 612). Otherwise, a new write set is generated(step 614).

Reads by one client can be grouped into one read set. In some cases, itis useful to further require the reads in one read group to be within Tunits of time, similar to the method for write sets. In this case, theprocess to generate read sets is similar to that of generating writesets. Generating read sets with a threshold T can help to reduce theaverage load of a client over a period of time.

Once write sets and read sets are generated, the next step is topartition the objects into authentication groups. This process mayinclude three steps as illustrated in FIG. 7. The first step (step 702)of process 700 is to group objects in a write set together. Then, theread set is transformed by replacing the object with the write setcontaining the object (step 704). Lastly, the authentication group isgenerated by grouping the objects in a read set starting with thehighest weight (step 706). The process continues grouping the objectsuntil the pre-specified size of authentication groups is reached.

An example of such a process is illustrated in FIG. 8. In this example,objects are being grouped into authentication groups of size 4. Thereare four read sets R1, R2, R3, and R4 denoted as 802 in FIG. 8. Theelements of R1 are A, I, and J, and the weight of R1 is 3. Here, theweight of each read set is the number of accesses of these read sets ina given interval. The weight can also be normalized. The elements andweights have the same meaning for other read sets, R2, R3, and R4.

The example uses the write sets illustrated in FIG. 5. First, we groupthe objects in write sets together (step 702 of FIG. 7). Thus, we havesix initial groups, W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, and W6. Next, the read sets aretransformed based on write sets (step 704 of FIG. 7). As an example, theelements of R1, A, I, and J, are replaced by the write sets to whichthose elements belong. Since A is in the write set W1, I is in the writeset W3, and J is in the write set W6, the elements of R1 are replaced byW1, W3, and W6. The same transformation is carried out for R2, R3, andR4. The transformed read sets are denoted as 804 in FIG. 8.

The last step (step 706 of FIG. 7) is to go through the read sets in theorder of weight to further group objects. Here, R2 is processed first.R2 contains W2 and W5. The objects in W2 and W5 are grouped together. Atthis point, the size of authentication groups is reached. D, G, W, and Tare output as Authentication Group 1. The same process is carried out togenerate Authentication Group 2 and Authentication Group 3. Theauthentication groups are denoted as 806 in FIG. 8. At this point, whenevery object is in an authentication group; the process stops. Eachauthentication group can be authenticated with authentication trees.

In the remainder of the illustrative description, it is assumed thatauthentication trees are used to authenticate authentication groups. Inparticular, Authentication Group 1 (in 806 of FIG. 8) is used as anexample.

Authentication costs can be further reduced by placing objects inauthentication trees based on a likely order that objects may beaccessed in. First, a read order graph is generated. FIG. 9 illustratesan example of a read order graph. In a read order graph, the nodes 902such as D, G, W, and T are the objects. A weight associated with adirect edge 904 between two nodes represents the number of times that anaccess of the first node precedes that of the second node. For example,an edge from D to G with a weight of 6 represents that there are sixtimes in which D is first accessed and then G. The process can furtherrequire the time between two successive accesses to be within a certainamount of time to increase the weight of the edge between the two nodes.

Once an object order graph is obtained, the objects can be placedaccordingly. One method is to do a depth-first traversal of a read ordergraph to generate an order in which an object is to be placed into anauthentication tree. In the graph illustrated in FIG. 9, the processfirst starts with the node with the heaviest outward edge. In this case,it is D. Then, the process does a depth-first traversal of the graph byfollowing the heaviest outward edge first. In this case, it is G next,and then W and T. The resulting sequence is called an object accessorder (OAR).

FIG. 10 illustrates an authentication tree 1000. The leaves of the treeare hashes of the objects. This type of tree is known as a Merkle hashtree, see, e.g., R. Merkle, “A Certified Digital Signature,” Proceedingsof Crypto'89. The invention provides novel methods for constructingMerkle hash trees. For example, the leaf M₁ results from applying asecure hash function H over the object D. The objects are placed fromright to left in the same order as OAR. An intermediate node is the hashof its two children. For example, M₁₋₂ is the parent of M₁ and M₂, andM₁₋₂ is calculated by apply the secure hash function H over the stringM₁ and M₂ appended together. The root is also signed with a public keyafter hashing its two children. In this example, the result of hashingis M₁₋₄. Generating a public key signature over this hashing results inPKI(M₁₋₄).

The signature of objects includes the root of the tree and the siblingsof nodes along the path from the node to root. Hence, the signature of Dis M₂, M₁₋₂, and R. To verify an object, a client can just apply thehash function along the path from the object to the root and generatethe root hashing M₁₋₄ and then verify if R is a public key signature ofthe root hashing.

FIG. 11 illustrates the benefits of placing objects according to theiraccess order. Note that authentication tree 1100 in FIG. 11 representsthe same example as authentication tree 1000 in FIG. 10. Theverification of G after D is used as an example. The signatures of D andG share all the hashes except the first one. Even the first hash forverifying G, M₂, can be computed by hashing the object D since M₂=H(G).Thus, when a client verifies G after D, no hashes are needed to be sentgiven that the previous hashes are cached. Since objects that are oftenaccessed successively are placed into the authentication trees together,the average savings can be significant.

Note that the algorithm for clustering objects by read and writepatterns illustrated in FIGS. 8 through 11 can be applied to otherproblems outside the domain of authentication. For example, it is oftendesirable to cluster objects in disk storage by read and write patterns.When objects are clustered in proximity to each other on disk based onread and/or write patterns, performance can be improved considerably.Therefore, the clustering methodology of the invention can be used bydisk storage systems to cluster objects by access locality. Such use ofthe invention can improve disk storage performance including throughputand/or read latency.

Given the teachings of the invention provided herein, some additionalimplementations and advantages that may be realized there from will nowbe described.

For example, one example of partitioning objects in accordance with theinvention may include first considering write sets and then consideringread sets. Objects in write sets are first grouped together. The weighton write sets can be considered too. A threshold W can be set on theweight. Only write sets with a weight greater than W are groupedtogether. Then, the initial groups are grouped together according theread sets. This method can reduce server overhead and client overhead inrespect to object updates. This method works particularly well whenwrite sets are small.

Further, the size of an authentication group can be adjusted by thesystem. Large authentication groups can be used to reduce serveroverhead at the expense of client overhead and signature size. Stillfurther, in some implementations, each object may be assigned to onlyone authentication tree. In other implementations, some objects can beassigned to multiple object trees. Assigning objects to multipleauthentication trees can reduce clients overhead at the expense ofservers' overhead.

In some cases, an intermediate layer can send the old version ofsignatures of an object to a client if the object has not changed, andthe change of other objects can prompt the generation of new signaturesfor the authentication tree.

As is evident, the teachings of the invention described herein alsoprovide a method for exploring object read order to reduce networkbandwidth consumption of authentication. Further, the invention cancapture the most likely order in which objects are read. One method tocapture read order may be through a read order graph. The nodes in aread order graph are the objects. The direct edge between these nodesrepresents the order of accesses. When a client accesses object A andthen accesses object B within a threshold time of t, the directed edgebetween A and B is incremented by one.

An illustrative method for generating an order in which objects areplaced in an authentication tree according to a read order graph mayinclude the following steps. The method first picks up an object O1 thatis connected to the heaviest outgoing edge. Then, the method traversesthe graph depth-first and follows the heaviest outgoing edge first.

Further, the methodologies of the invention allow a client to cache asignature of a previously read object to authenticate a new object. Theclient only needs to retrieve the part of the signature that is not inprevious signatures to authenticate a new object.

Still further, a client can adjust the number of signatures it wants tocache based on its memory size, write frequency, and the cost of networkbandwidth.

Also, an intermediate layer can track an object and thus whichsignatures a client already has through the Internet Protocol (IP)address or cookies of the client. A client can also inform theintermediate layer which signature it has cached in its request for anew object.

It is to be further appreciated that the present invention alsocomprises techniques for providing content delivery services. By way ofexample, a content provider agrees (e.g., via a service level agreementor some informal agreement or arrangement) with a customer or client toprovide content. Then, based on terms of the service contract betweenthe content provider and the content customer, the content providerprovides content to the content customer in accordance with one or moreof the clustering and authentication methodologies of the inventiondescribed herein. Similarly, disk storage services could also beprovided.

Referring finally to FIG. 12, a block diagram illustrates anillustrative hardware implementation of a computing system in accordancewith which one or more components/steps of a content distribution system(e.g., components and methodologies described in the context of FIGS. 1through 11) may be implemented, according to an embodiment of thepresent invention. It is to be understood that the individualcomponents/steps may be implemented on one such computer system, or morepreferably, on more than one such computer system. In the case of animplementation on a distributed computing system, the individualcomputer systems and/or devices may be connected via a suitable network,e.g., the Internet or World Wide Web. However, the system may berealized via private or local networks. The invention is not limited toany particular network.

As shown, the computer system 1200 may be implemented in accordance witha processor 1202, a memory 1204, I/O devices 1206, and a networkinterface 1208, coupled via a computer bus 1210 or alternate connectionarrangement.

It is to be appreciated that the term “processor” as used herein isintended to include any processing device, such as, for example, onethat includes a CPU (central processing unit) and/or other processingcircuitry. It is also to be understood that the term “processor” mayrefer to more than one processing device and that various elementsassociated with a processing device may be shared by other processingdevices.

The term “memory” as used herein is intended to include memoryassociated with a processor or CPU, such as, for example, RAM, ROM, afixed memory device (e.g., hard drive), a removable memory device (e.g.,diskette), flash memory, etc.

In addition, the phrase “input/output devices” or “I/O devices” as usedherein is intended to include, for example, one or more input devices(e.g., keyboard, mouse, etc.) for entering data to the processing unit,and/or one or more output devices (e.g., speaker, display, etc.) forpresenting results associated with the processing unit.

Still further, the phrase “network interface” as used herein is intendedto include, for example, one or more transceivers to permit the computersystem to communicate with another computer system via an appropriatecommunications protocol.

Accordingly, software components including instructions or code forperforming the methodologies described herein may be stored in one ormore of the associated memory devices (e.g., ROM, fixed or removablememory) and, when ready to be utilized, loaded in part or in whole(e.g., into RAM) and executed by a CPU.

Although illustrative embodiments of the present invention have beendescribed herein with reference to the accompanying drawings, it is tobe understood that the invention is not limited to those preciseembodiments, and that various other changes and modifications may bemade by one skilled in the art without departing from the scope orspirit of the invention.

1. In a Web-based content distribution system with at least one serverand at least one client, a method for one of generating at the serverand reading at the client authentication information in the form of oneor more signatures, wherein the authentication information providesevidence that a plurality of objects were one of generated and sent byan entity, comprising a computer system performing step of: determiningat the server one or more object access patterns; using at the serverthe one or more object access patterns indicative of whether at leasttwo of the plurality of objects are accessed within a similar timeperiod to group objects together to reduce an overhead for at least oneof generating at the server and reading at the client the authenticationinformation, wherein the authentication information comprises the one ormore signatures; wherein the using the one or more object accesspatterns step further comprises an accessed object being read orupdated, and grouping objects together using at least one graph whereinthe at least one graph comprises at least one Merkle hash tree, theobject grouping step further comprising placing two objects of theobjects being grouped in a same graph if the objects have similar accesspatterns; maintaining at the server a set of objects which are likely tobe updated in close temporal proximity to each other, wherein themaintaining step further comprises determining the set of objects usingat least one of an object dependency graph, analysis of code generatingthe set of objects likely to be updated, and on-line analysis of changepatterns of the set of objects likely to be updated; maintaining at theserver a set of objects which are likely to be read in close temporalproximity to each other, wherein the maintaining step further comprisesdetermining the set of objects using at least one of analysis of codewhich reads the set of objects likely to be read, and analysis of readpatterns of the set of objects likely to be read; partitioning at theserver objects to be transferred across the content distribution systeminto authentication groups having respective signatures associatedtherewith using write sets with a weight exceeding a threshold;partitioning at the server objects to be transferred across the contentdistribution system based on read sets; wherein objects to betransferred across the content distribution system are assigned to theauthentication groups and a size of an authentication group can beadjusted to trade off central processing unit overhead and a signaturesize, an old version of a signature of an object is used if the objecthas not changed, and an object read order is explored to reduce a sizeof authentication information transferred across the contentdistribution system; the client caching a signature of a previously readobject to reduce the overhead for a future authentication; the clientadjusting a number of cached signatures based on one of memory size,write frequency, and a network bandwidth cost; an intermediate layertracking which signatures the client has cached using clientidentification information, wherein the identification informationcomprises one of an Internet Protocol address and a cookie; and theclient informing the intermediate layer of a signature the client hascached in a request for a new object.